That hilarious part is that this paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal---and none of the reviewers realized that he'd rediscovered some 17th century math.
But rediscovering some old math doesn't make it that bad. I've rediscovered old math before, and it was something that mathematicians around me thought was interesting because they hadn't seen it before either. What makes this particularly egregious is that everyone involved theoretically took a course that not only described this exact technique, but which described an even better one! (Simpson's rule.)
I wouldn't recommend following Watson's advice on the correct attitude to your fellow man.
For further information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson and scroll down to "Controversies".
Here is a piece of interesting trivia about that. Rosalind Franklin was a true expert on x-ray diffraction. However there are 230 possible space groups. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_group for more on that.) The x-ray diffraction pattern you see depends on the space group, and so one of the first step is to go through all of the possibilities and identify which one you have, and only then can you really start figuring out what you have. Rosalind Franklin knew about all of them. But by luck Watson's PhD thesis had been on a protein with the exact same set of symmetries that DNA has. As a result he was in a much better position than she to interpret her data.
This cannot be overstated. And when ego is the cause...oy vey! I believe that one of the greatest intellectual challenges to overcome when one over identifies as being "brilliant" is the, oft youthful, focus on pedantry. How embarrassingly ironic to display one's ignorance as a result of flaunting one's intellect. As a recovering pendant well in to those years that separate true youth from "decidedly middle-aged" let me sincerely recommend to some of our (mostly) younger members that they put down the Bertrand Russell long enough to pick up some William Blake.
When used properly, I have found that one of the most powerful phrases I can use to build confidence, trust, and credibility with a client is "I don't know."I can't imagine spending months on a peer-reviewed paper accomplishing the same amount of nothing. That would be disheartening to say the least.
I bet you created a half-assed linked-list implementation and prefixed the class name with your initial, though ;)
When I was 15 I took my first real programming course. Soon I was a bit sadder and much wiser. Fortunately, it was just part of the cirriculum. I managed to learn the lesson without ever displaying my shocking ignorance and bringing shame to my family for generations. (not to mention completeling the homework implementing a simple linked list with much speed)
The really sad part is, despite all my enthusiasm, it never once occured to me to link them in both directions to enable bi-directional traversal. Half-assed indeed.
I just so happen to be starting out. Do you mean generating cases like "prefix-[i+1]” ?
Programmers are especially vulnerable to this. Who hasn't made a 4 page case statement when 3 lines of recursion would have done it, especially when starting out? Then again, I've never named my case statements after myself.
No matter how brilliant one is, its ridiculously hard to know what you don't know. In fact, sometimes being very advanced in one field makes it doubly hard to think of in one you're poor in.